. In every
mountain land they are to be met with, and in each of the Alpine passes
little groups of houses--they can scarcely be called villages--can
be detected in spots where access is most difficult, where no
feature around indicates any means of supporting life, and where the
precautions--simple and ineffectual enough--against avalanches, shew
that danger to be among their calculations. How explain this? By
what associations have these dreary spots become hallowed into homes?
Possibly the isolated lives of these little families of men give them
the same distaste to mixing with their brethren of the great world, that
is felt by a solitary recluse to entering into society. Mayhap, too,
the sense of peril itself has its share in the attraction. There is
no saying how far this feeling may go, so strange and wayward are the
caprices of human nature.

If you enter any of these villages, the narratives of snow storms, of
falling precipices, and "Lavines," as avalanches are called, meet you
at every step. They are the great topics of these communities, as the
movements of Politics or the vacillations of the Bourse are elsewhere.
Scarcely one who has reached the middle term of life has not been, at
least once, in the most imminent peril; and these things are talked of
as the common accidents of existence, the natural risks of humanity!
Very strange does it sound to us who discuss so eagerly the perils of a
wooden pavement in our thoroughfares!

It is curious, too, to hear, as one may, most authentically, the length
of time life can be preserved beneath the snow. Individuals have been
buried so long as three entire days, and yet taken out alive. The
cold, of which it would be supposed they had suffered dreadfully, seems
scarcely very great; and the porous nature of the snow, and possibly the
chinks and crevices left between falling masses, have usually left air
sufficient for respiration. That individuals in such circumstances
of peril are not, always at least, devoid of their exercise of the
faculties, I remember one instance which is sufficiently convincing.
It was in the Via Mala, about five miles from the village of Spluegen,
where, in the year 1829, the little cabriolet that conveyed the mail was
swept away by an avalanche. The calamity was not known for full seven
or eight hours afterwards, when some travellers from Andeer reaching the
spot, found the road blocked up by snow, and perceived a portion of the
wooden rail